Category: people

“He began his journalistic career in 1953 as a political writer for the Manchester Guardian, taking up reviewing recordings for the paper in 1955 (he was later appointed the Guardian‘s chief music critic in 1977, retiring in 1993).” He also spent 55 years as a contributing critic for Gramophone.

Dorothy Bohm: “After what happened in my lifetime, and to me and my family, I just hoped that the world would be a better place, I think we all hoped.”

“‘Jane dreamed up many innovative techniques — before the age of computers — to bring inanimate objects to life,’ said Christopher Cerf, her collaborator on ‘Sesame Street.’ … To demonstrate the concepts of jam-packed and empty, she sent chirping chickens charging into a room through a door and a window, only to retreat just as swiftly.”

“Manzano’s gift to us, the power of her presence, lies in the fullness of Maria’s humanity. While still being proudly brown and representing Nuyorican excellence in all its glory, Maria never became a caricature, never boxed herself into the facile images of Latinos that American television sometimes still offers up. She slipped easily in and out of Spanish and English, celebrated her culture lovingly, became a feminist, worked as a repair woman, got married and had a baby, and, perhaps most importantly, aged – all before our eyes.”

“Yet none of his major compositions are in print, he rarely performs, and he places such extensive restrictions on performances of his music that it’s rarely heard. He has all but disappeared, by his own hand.”

“He has become a character, an icon, and in some circles a saint. A writer who courted contradiction and paradox, who could come on as a curmudgeon and a scold, who emerged from an avant-garde tradition and never retreated into conventional realism, he has been reduced to a wisdom-dispensing sage on the one hand and shorthand for the Writer As Tortured Soul on the other.”

“Although he coined the expression “third stream” in the late 1950s as a suitable epithet for his own amalgam of classical and jazz forms, his music was technically complex and demanding. Hence it never secured a wide and sympathetic audience in his lifetime.”

The motivation for destroying an artist’s work is often shadowy, and always riven with questions of ownership.

“In March, Patterson invited librarians, teachers and principals to apply for $1,000 to $10,000 grants. Scholastic Reading Club, a division of children’s publisher Scholastic, pledged to match each grant with bonus points that can be used for books and classroom materials. More than 28,000 applications came pouring in.”

alongside the serious queries came a deluge of questions that made fun of James’s much-criticised prose style, including jibes such as “Do you get paid per adjective?”, “Have you ever held a dictionary?” and “Did you ever consider using a thesaurus, or did that sound too much like hard work?”